


Hysterical Light

by quietcoast



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Magic, Canon-typical language, Curses, M/M, Magic Mickey Milkovich, Shameless Big Bang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-19
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-31 08:38:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17846087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietcoast/pseuds/quietcoast
Summary: There was a house that nobody went into.It wasn’t haunted. It wasn’t condemned. It wasn’t barred shut.There were rumors about the house. Whispers about its life before it was a lockbox, about drug debts and jail sentences and families with more magic than they needed, or less, depending on who you asked. There were whispers that the house was cursed, and that the curse would rub off on anyone who got too close.*It has been a long time since anyone has seen Mickey Milkovich, and the neighborhood has all but forgotten him. Mickey’s name may have left the common consciousness, but there is one thing that everybody seems to know: there’s a house on Trumbull Ave. that nobody can go into, and something bad will happen to you if you try.When strange things begin happening a few blocks away at the Gallagher house, it’s clear that the events have a magical origin. Ian suspects a curse, and looks for answers at the only other cursed location he knows of.He finds answers. He finds something else, too.





	Hysterical Light

There was a house that nobody went into.

It wasn’t haunted. It wasn’t condemned. It wasn’t barred shut.

The front door could bang open, could grate closed. The windows could slide most of the way up before the decades-old accumulation of greasy dust in the tracks stopped them. The winter air could wriggle its pinching fingers through the gap between door and threshold, could jam its biting teeth through invisible inconsistencies in the glass.

There were rumors about the house. Whispers about its life before it was a lockbox, about drug debts and jail sentences and families with more magic than they needed, or less, depending on who you asked. There were whispers that the house was cursed, and that the curse would rub off on anyone who got too close.

People speculated, talked in circles about what they knew, tried to figure out the shape of the house’s secrets based on the spaces they couldn’t fill in. The house was a local urban legend, an old piece of meat that the drunks down at the Alibi Room gnawed on whenever their mouths got too empty.

There was a house that nobody went into, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Even the stillest house has something to steal; even the worst building is better than nothing, if it still has a roof. Every once in a while someone too drunk or angry or stupid to know better would climb the ten steps to the front porch and wedge a crowbar against the seam of the door, lob a hex bag onto the roof, edge through the chain-link gate and try their hand at a ground-level window.

This is what would happen: the crowbar would glance off of the empty space just above the door; the bag would burst and send dirt and teeth flying like buckshot; the window would stay closed, and the people would leave with singed fingertips.

And in the moments between arrival and retreat, a curtain would flick open inside the house, and someone would look through the gap.

The thing about a curse is that it is always a punishment for something: a curse, then, is never far from the person it is cursing.

There was a house that nobody went into. Nobody came out of it, either.

*

“Please, Fiona, _please_ , Fiona, _please Fiona—_ ”

“ _No_ , Debs, I’m sorry, but you’re going to school, and that’s final.”

The morning smelled like waffles, and the sun was a warm touch against Ian’s face. His feet fell in sure thuds against each stair, step _thunk_ step _thunk_ and a final jump past the last few steps, just because he could. He felt loose and capable, ready for the day.

“Morning, Ian! Waffles in five.”

“ _Fiona_ —”

It was a familiar scene: Fiona, a whirlwind in the kitchen, eyes a little bruised, hair a little wild; Debbie, red-cheeked and haloed in auburn frizz, perched at the bar. Ian darted into the kitchen, dodged the swat Fiona aimed at him, and stole a waffle off of the stack. He shoved it into his mouth before Fiona could snatch it back, but overestimated how much he could fit and started pushing stray pieces in with his fingers. “Morning,” he managed, as he slid into a chair beside Debbie.

Fiona shot him a look that was equal parts disgust and amusement. “I said waffles in five, not take food whenever.”

“’S good.” He swallowed. “Thanks.” He gave Fiona a sunny smile, and her disgust reluctantly transformed into fondness.

“Fi _ona_.” Debbie’s tone became somehow more demanding. Ian offered her part of his waffle; she waved it away.

“ _Deb_ bie; no.” Fiona flipped another waffle onto the plate with one hand, and tucked a clump of curls behind her ear with the other.

Ian’s eyebrows pinched together. “What’s wrong, Debs?” He elbowed his younger sister gently, and shoved another chunk of waffle into his mouth. They tasted better than box waffles usually did; maybe Fiona had put in extra cinnamon or something.

Fiona rolled her eyes. “Debbie wants a snow day.” She turned to the sink and began running water over the gluey residue left in the waffle bowl. “I told her it wasn’t gonna happen.”

Lip clattered down the stairs, pulling an overshirt on as he went. “Did someone say we’re having a snow day?”

“ _No_ ,” Fiona said, at the same time that Debbie said “ _Yes._ ”

“Come on, Fiona,” Ian said, around the last of his waffle. “We haven’t had one all year.”

“Could be fun,” Lip added.

Outside, the morning was bright and lovely and snowless, a perfect example of late fall on its best behavior. Not the traditional landscape for a snow day, maybe, but on the rare days that Fiona allowed them all to beg off school as a treat, snow hardly mattered. An official snow day usually required temperatures well below zero; a Gallagher snow day only required a lazy streak and a sense of adventure, both of which were Gallagher birthrights.

“I say we do it,” Ian decided, while reaching over the counter for a second waffle.

“Guys, for the last time—” Fiona started, and then stopped.

It was hard to say why she stopped, until it wasn’t. Ian felt it a moment after Fiona did: the house seemed to hold its breath for a split second—and then the kitchen faucet sputtered, coughed up a final mouthful of water, and stopped running. Carl, who was upstairs in the shower, let out a distant yelp. Ian could feel his cheery sense of ease peeling off of him like a second skin, sloughing off to reveal an anxious, tingling dread.

A dull buzz settled into every space in the room.

Carl dripped down the stairs in a pair of basketball shorts and a towel; Fiona’s mouth was slightly open in a way she didn’t seem aware of; Debbie’s eyes were black scorch marks on a pinched, white sheet of a face; the air seemed to churn in Ian’s peripheral vision, and then stilled whenever his eyes moved to catch the motion. It was silent but for Liam, who was drumming contentedly on the table with a wooden spoon.

“What,” Lip said finally, “the fuck?”

“I don’t know,” Fiona said, and then, “maybe a—a pipe broke?”

“It’s like sixty-five degrees outside, no fucking way a pipe broke.” Lip pushed past Fiona into the kitchen, twisted the faucet handles on and off then on again, with no results.

And then, in slow motion horror, Ian watched a grey stain fork across the ceiling, spread a little, spread a little more, and then transform into a steady trickle of water coming from the light fixture.

“Fuck,” Ian said.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Fiona echoed. “It’s gotta be a pipe. Carl, go into the basement and shut off the water. Lip, flip the breaker before we all get fucking electrocuted. Ian, Debbie, towels, _now._ _Fuck_.”

Everybody scrambled. By the time the water was off and the electricity was cut, water was seeping from the seam between wall and ceiling.

“The towels aren’t getting all of it, Fi,” Ian said from the floor, where he was pushing water around. “What should we do?”

“Uh.” Fiona was standing on a chair, unscrewing the light fixture. “I dunno, open the door, push the water outside?” When she reached the final screw, the glass dome slipped from the ceiling into her hand, and dumped water onto her upturned face.

Ian tossed her one of the few remaining dry towels, and then nodded for Debbie to follow Fiona's instructions. Debbie sprang to do so, and then, upon opening the door, froze with her mouth open. “ _Whoa_.”

A wave of cold air rushed in, and rang through the kitchen like a bell: _wrong. wrong. wrong._

“Oh, shit,” Ian said.

“What?” Fiona pushed her damp hair out of her eyes with the towel while scrambling down from the chair. “What is it?”

The door was a picture frame, and the view outside was a painting titled _Winter_. Everything was a frantic white; a slight, curved drift of fine powder was already accumulating on the porch.

Ian exhaled a cloud of icy mist. “It’s a snow day,” he said.

And it was. Ian watched as the window in the door iced over, as tiny blooms of frost faded into existence on the glass. It wasn’t just a snow day, it was cold, real winter.

“Well,” Fiona said, “I guess we’re staying home after all.”

*

 _Beauty and the Beast_ : now there was a terrible fuckin’ movie. Prince is a dickbag; Prince gets cursed; Prince has a shitty life until some broad decides she wants to bang a wildebeest; everyone lives happily-ever-fucking-after.

People wanted a story about curses? Mickey Milkovich would be happy to give them one.

Here was how it went: South Side slum kid has a shitty family; South Side slum kid fucks up; South Side slum kid is imprisoned in his own house; South Side slum kid takes up interior decorating.

Mickey figured he was something of a prodigy. With nothing but his wits and his big fuck-off hunting knife, he had turned the living room into a castle of profanity. His first masterpiece was on the wall where the TV used to be: a great, meaty FUCK that he had hacked as far into the wall as the curse would allow. After figuring out that he couldn’t carve his own window, door, or tunnel back into the real world, he had added a concise list of suggestions next to the FUCK: you, this, off, the police.

That had been a while ago. Mickey wasn’t really sure how long; time wasn’t something he cared much about anymore. Instead, he cared about perfecting the graceful curve of the _S_ he was cutting into the drywall. The gutting hook on the back of his blade was surprisingly useful for fine details.

It was looking good. He had finally gotten the hang of the letter S, had figured out that the trick was to draw the bottom half larger than the upper half, and then kind of thicken up the join in the middle. His dad had been right, after all: art really was for fags. Mickey was kicking ass.

The wall décor wasn’t the only adjustment Mickey had made to the house since he had inherited it. There were a few inconveniences he had fixed: for instance, the oven had originally been very good at heating food, which was fine if you could leave your house to get more food to put in it. But Mickey could not walk to the corner store for groceries, or call for takeout, or have his sister bring him some leftovers, so the oven as it was had little use. With a bit of Milkovich ingenuity and a spell that had taken him a full, panicked week to workshop into functionality, the oven now multiplied whatever was put into it, rather than heating it up.

On the day his father had brought the witch over to seal Mickey in for good, the contents of their kitchen had been: half a bag of Frosted Flakes, three boxes of spaghetti noodles, a fistful of instant rice, a gallon of extra-pulp orange juice, fourteen cans of tomato soup, and one freezer burned philly cheesesteak-flavored Hot Pocket.

Mickey suspected that his father had removed all the beer from the house beforehand, out of spite.

When his S was a calligraphic triumph set into the wall, Mickey shuffled into the kitchen to take his lunch break. This involved throwing the Frosted Flakes into the oven, setting the dial to 300, and waiting fifteen minutes. At the end of the fifteen minutes, he would have three times the amount of Frosted Flakes he had started with: thus, lunch.

The house wasn’t really all that different from when the whole family had lived there. Maybe there was less dirt, but he had made the walls filthy in other ways to compensate. Maybe there wasn’t much food, but it had always seemed like someone was asking Mickey to perform the same miracle then as he did now, to take one serving of food and magic it into enough for five people. The water was still on, and usually the gas, thanks to Mandy, but it had been months or years or minutes since there had been electricity. Half the time nobody had paid the electric before, though, so it wasn’t much of a change.

No, the main difference was not in the house; rather, it was in Mickey. Once he had been forced to be creative, clever, resourceful, he had found that he was good at it. Once he had been removed from his family and their judgment, he had realized how much they had held him back. Once he had to rely on his trickle of magic to keep himself alive, he had found that it wasn’t a trickle at all, that it was more like a flooding basement of magic, a shark tank of sparking potential.

Time alone had made him stranger and more dangerous, more forgiving, more himself. But it hadn’t made him powerful enough to figure out how to get out from under his curse.

The oven timer made the nasally rattling sound that meant his food was ready, and Mickey slid his three half-full bags of cereal off of the rack. He was sick to his heart of eating fucking cereal, but not quite as sick as he was of tomato fucking soup, so cereal it was.

“Tony the Tiger can suck my dick,” Mickey told the empty room, casually, loudly. Sometimes he liked to practice saying things, just to make sure he still could.

Just as he was plunging his hand into the crackling plastic of his sugar-glazed feast, a thin, sensuous voice drifted from the living room. Mickey perked up. “Oh, fuck, really?” he said, and crossed the kitchen to stick his head around the corner. “Hey, say that again? Couldn’t quite hear you.”

The voice in question came from another one of Mickey’s improvements. Her name was Drina, and she had started life as the splay-legged star of one of Iggy’s posters; now, she was a few different things, mostly Mickey’s doorbell. She was cursed to forever bend herself around some shitty, souped-up motorcycle, to arch her back in a way that Mickey had once been jealous of, before he tried it and realized what a number it did on his lower back. Mickey shoved a handful of cereal in his mouth. Drina always made him feel a little bit better about his own situation.

“Mandy Milkovich,” she repeated, and tossed her long hair from one shoulder to the other.

“Oh,” Mickey said, through his food. “Cool.” He ambled to the front door, took the doorknob in hand, eyed the row of unlatched locks that always gave him a little chill of unease, even after so long of them being completely pointless. That was the most unsettling thing about the whole thing, maybe, that he lived where he lived and didn’t need to lock his doors.

He pulled the door open, in and in and in, just another thing that could only move if it moved closer to the house. The world outside was a sliver of light and color, first, then a handspan of scrubby, dead yard, and somewhere—yes, there she was. Mandy was already inside the fence, just as the poster had said, back turned while she pulled the gate closed behind her.

While Mandy was distracted, Mickey inched his foot toward the threshold, and against his better judgment, hope swelled up in him, just like every other time. Maybe this time, maybe, maybe—but his toe nudged across the last millimeter of metal stripping and stopped against the wall of nothing that held him in.

Mickey sighed—and then flipped it into a grin the second Mandy turned around. “Hey, baby sister,” he called, loud enough for her to hear as she approached, loud enough for the neighborhood to remember he was real, if they chose to. “’Bout fuckin’ time, haven’t seen you in months. Was startin’ to think you bailed on me.”

Mandy’s hair was all black again, after her most recent flirtation with purple, then pink once the purple faded. She flipped him off with both hands, and Mickey was suddenly, absurdly grateful for Mandy’s normalcy, for her flashy teenage bullshit. “I was here last week, fuckhead,” she retorted, as she bounced up the stairs. “I keep telling you I can bring you a calendar.”

“Yeah, and, what? Nail it to the welcome mat, flip the page for me every month?”

“Maybe, fuck off!” She aimed a pointless kick at his knees. “Be nice to me, asshole, I’m the only good relative you have.”

She had a point. “Whatever,” Mickey said. “Is that a new hole in your face?”

“Nose ring,” Mandy said proudly, and touched her fingertips to her nostril. “I did it Saturday. It didn’t even hurt that bad, Iggy said his friends did his nose once while he was drunk and it was awful, but I think he was just saying that to scare me.”

“Or he’s a little bitch,” Mickey said reasonably. Mandy shrugged in agreement.

Mandy wasn’t lying when she said she was his only good relative. Mickey was positive that their dad didn’t know Mandy was coming to see him, just like he didn’t know that Mandy was paying the water and gas every month. Mandy was the only visitor Mickey ever got, honestly. Sometimes Drina would throw out another name, usually an unfamiliar one, but it was almost always some kid coming up to the house on a dare, or some drunk fuck looking for a place to crash. Mandy was kind of all he had, these days.

“So, hey,” Mandy piped up after a moment, “what’s new in the house?”

“Cocksucker,” Mickey said, and stepped to the side so Mandy could crane her head to look over his shoulder.

“Where—oh,” she said, and frowned. She had spotted Mickey’s most recent masterpiece. “That just says ‘Cocks’.”

Mickey rolled his eyes. “’S not done yet. Art takes, fuckin’—time, you know, method. Anyway, it’s a good S, right?”

Mandy squinted at the wall. “Huh. Kind of is, actually. Who’da thought.”

The sun was out, just right, in a way that felt like fall, like fingers against his cheek. The air smelled like wood smoke and leaves, exhaust and the sour tang of metal from the L tracks. Mickey closed his eyes. Sometimes he forgot that he could still open the door, even if he couldn’t walk through it. “Hey,” he said, eyes still closed, “so I think I figured out what we’re missing in that drink, that sleep thing.”

With his eyes closed, the world was an orange glow and Mandy’s voice came from all around him, leaked into his ears. “I was thinking about that, too. More valerian, maybe?”

Mickey snorted. “Nah, sounds like there’s a hipster fuckin’ health food store on every corner, anyone could just buy some valerian if it would do the trick. No, what I figured is that we’re makin’ the same mistake that everyone else keeps makin’.” He took a deep breath, sweet air in and in until his chest ached with it. It made the back of his throat itch, made his brain itch, so he pushed the air back out in a rush. “Fuck, I want a smoke,” he muttered, momentarily distracted.

“Earth to Mickey,” Mandy said, exasperated. “What’s this big mistake we’re making, then, if you’re so goddamned smart?”

“Oh,” he said, and opened his eyes. Mandy looked annoyed, and he laughed. “Right. It’s just, we’re makin’ magic shit, right? So, stands to reason we should probably do a little magic.”

“You know I’m not—good at that stuff,” Mandy said. The faint line between her eyebrows deepened, and she started picking at the chipping paint on the porch’s support columns. “Not as much as you, at least. Anyway, the love thing we made has been selling like crazy, and we barely did anything to it.”

“Yeah, but the love thing doesn’t fuckin’, work, does it,” Mickey pointed out. He leaned against the door, pushed his toes against the ridge of metal edging the doorway. “Doesn’t need to. That one was all in the advertising. Nobody knows if they’re in love or not, that shit’s easy to fake. But people drink our sleepy juice and don’t fall asleep, that’s on us. Listen, I bet you take the recipe we’ve got now, but mix it at night, like. Start on the new moon, add some ingredients every night, leave it in the window until it starts to get light out, finish it up on the full moon. It’s all in the intent, man.”

Mandy frowned, and flicked a stripe of paint out from under her fingernail. “That’ll take forever.”

“Yeah, well,” Mickey sucked another breath in, pretended it tasted like smoke, like it crackled against his tongue. “Makes you tired just thinkin’ about it, doesn’t it? If it works, we jack up the price for the extra labor hours. Win win.”

“I guess I’ll try it, if you really think it’ll work.” Mandy’s hand drifted to the space between the world and the front door, and scratched at it like it was just more paint she could peel off. “I wish we could figure out how to get you out of here, then you could just do this shit yourself.”

Mickey brought his hand up to mirror Mandy’s, and tried scratching at the barrier, too. The sensation made his teeth buzz in an uncomfortable, electrified way.

Mandy dropped her hand. Her expression was dull, pained—and then, suddenly, she brightened. “Oh, fuck, I forgot to tell you—get _this_. You remember the Gallaghers?”

“Yeah, I guess. Fuckin’ Frank, and all them?”

“His kids mostly, but yeah. Anyway, I was in the neighborhood on my way here, and I ran into Lip Gallagher, and guess what?” Mandy’s face split into a gleeful jackal grin; it sucker punched Mickey with a reminder that she was a Milkovich, same as the rest of them. “Their house is _snowing_.”

It seemed like maybe Mickey had misheard her, because his face was a little numb, and his ears were kind of ringing, which wasn’t a normal reaction. He shook it off. “That right? How does a house snow? Is the building—what, floatin’ in the air, rainin’ out white shit?”

Mandy shook her head, flattened her hand and moved it as if drawing a picture. “No, it’s, like, the sky above their house thinks it’s January, there’s like a foot of snow piled against their door. Nobody knows what’s going on, but _I_ think it’s hilarious. About time someone else gets the shitty end of a magic trick, and if it’s Lip fucking Gallagher, all the better.” She paused, gave Mickey a sideways glance, and continued in a carefully nonchalant tone. “You think that sounds like normal magic stuff, right? Not, like. You know.”

Mickey shot her a look right back. “A curse?” he responded drily. “I dunno. Depends. Does the snow stop eventually? Does it follow one specific person, or is it centered around the house? My guess, Frank pissed off the wrong person, and someone’s tryin’ to fuck with him. Could be a curse. Could be less complicated.” Mickey knocked twice on the doorframe. “Either way? Not my problem.”

“Well, no. But I think it’s funny.” Mandy raised her eyebrows at him, defying him to disagree with her, asking him to be on her side.

It was a look Mickey was familiar with. They had years of practice being each other’s only allies. “Oh, it’s hilarious,” Mickey agreed, and spiked his eyebrows back at her. “Fuck the Gallaghers. Pretty sure Frank owes me money. Or did, anyway.”

Mandy gave him a relieved smile. “I can tell Iggy to collect,” she reasoned. “He’s definitely dumb enough to give me the money without asking too many questions.”

“Yeah,” Mickey said. “Maybe.”

“I’ll see about the money. And the moon thing, too, I guess.” Mickey blinked, and just like that, Mandy was halfway down the steps. “Gotta go, asshole. See you soon!”

It took no time at all for her to leave. Mickey spent a moment watching the empty yard, looking at the space Mandy had just been occupying, and then his eyes drifted to the sky—and yeah, a few blocks away, maybe he could see a greyish blur, maybe it could look like a single house getting a private lap dance from winter, if that’s what he expected to see. But in the end, it had nothing to do with him.

Mickey closed the door.

*

A dark cloud hung over the Gallagher house, literally and figuratively. The snow fell in a neat rectangle, weighing down the roof, collecting on the stairs. It slouched through the chain link fence in places, intruded on the neighbors and the street in little heaps.

It was fucking cold.

Carl appeared occasionally on the porch, like the spectre of death materializing in the whiteout: he was bundled to the ears in sweaters and scarves, and he clutched a wicked looking machete in his hand. He thunked it into the newly accumulated snow a few times, just for the fun of it, before using it to scrape the entryway clear.

The inside of the house was a catastrophe. The corners of the kitchen and dining room were piled with towels, like soggy hills of cotton and dirt and hair. Everything that had once been on the floor was now somewhere else: shoes tiptoed up the stairs in mounds; books and backpacks and hoodies lined the kitchen counters; dripping rugs crouched on the table and chairs like lumpy children in a cartoon, trying to avoid a loose mouse.

Fiona was on the phone. “You’re sure you won’t?” Her voice edged into a plea; her eyes were scrunched closed, her hand was pushed into the tangle of her hair. She was damp and heavy limbed, a fountain statue brought reluctantly to life. “We would really appreciate— _Jesus_ , okay, okay, I get it. Thanks anyway, Harold.” She lowered the phone, tapped the screen to end the call, and sighed.

“Anything?” Debbie asked anxiously. She was tucked into a ball on the first landing of the stairs.

Ian stuck his head in from the living room. “Was that the plumber?”

“Yeah.” Fiona was staring at her phone as if it might materialize some better news. “Says he would come take a look under normal circumstances, but that we couldn’t pay him enough to, and I quote, ‘poke around in some magical bullshit’.”

“I bet that Greg guy would do it,” Debbie said, from around her hand. She was chewing on her thumbnail. “The one who came last time daddy borrowed the copper from the upstairs bathroom?”

“He _stole_ it, Debs, he didn’t borrow it.” Ian crossed his arms. Compacting his body, even in that slight way, made him feel like a little less of a target. Too bad he couldn’t see whatever it was that had decided to target them.

“And ‘that Greg guy’,” Lip called, from where he was banging through the door in a burst of cold air, “is really goddamn expensive. But worry not—I think I’ve found a solution.” He paused in unwinding his scarf, and surveyed the scene with a kind of bemused cheer that did not feel at all appropriate to the situation. “By the way, who gave Carl a machete? He’s out there using it to murder snow.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Fiona muttered. She slid her phone into her pocket, and stalked through the living room to go address the Carl situation.

Ian watched her go, and then turned to Lip and shrugged. “Couldn’t find the shovel,” he said. Lip just laughed. “So, when you say a solution, what does that mean? You know how to make the snow stop?”

“Not a chance,” Lip replied, in the same odd, cheery way with which he had taken in the wreckage of the house. “But what it _does_ mean is that Vee and I had a major breakthrough, and I can already smell the cash.” His face split into a grin.

“On the memory thing?” Fiona asked, from where she was dragging a white-dusted lump of little brother back into the house. “You got buyers? I thought—Carl, no give me that.” Carl was attempting to wrestle her for the machete; Ian closed his eyes for a brief moment, until Carl’s complaints let him know that Fiona had won out, and nobody had been accidentally stabbed or hacked.

“Every single person on that college campus is a buyer.” Lip was the picture of confidence. “Trust me, Fi. You should see it. You’ve got your standard issue partiers, who drink until they don’t know their own names, much less the answers to a quiz they barely studied for. You’ve got all the fuckin’ nerds, taking more classes than they can think about. And then you’ve got the kids who think, well, you know, drugs are bad, but maybe pot is getting a little boring.”

“So everyone else,” Debbie said astutely. She had uncurled herself from the stairs, and picked her way into the living room to join the conversation.

“Exactly.” Lip rubbed Debbie’s hair into a new tier of staticky disarray, until she shrieked and bounded away onto the couch. “They all want a better memory. But memory spells are as hard to come by as any other spell—until now, when they will be available in a convenient, discreet pill form. For a price, of course.”

“Of course,” Ian echoed. He and Lip exchanged a smirk.

“It’s the ultimate study tool. I’ve already got a list going. There are still a few side effects that we’re tinkering with, but nothing so bad that I can’t start selling now."

“So what you’re saying,” Fiona said, “Is that I should call Greg the plumber, and you’ll make sure the check I use to pay him doesn’t bounce.”

“Sounds about right.”

Fiona disappeared into the next room to make her phone call. Debbie followed behind her, pawing at her hair like a disgruntled cat.

Ian gazed out the window for a moment, feeling a little blank, a lot tired. His skin still held the memory of that uncomfortable crawling sensation, that sense of wrongness that had preceded the pipe bursting. If he squinted, he could see the sunny street through the curtain of snow. “You think it’s slowing down out there at all?” he asked Lip, without much optimism.

“Maybe,” Lip replied. He was settling onto the couch in the spot Debbie had vacated. “Oh, hey, get this—I ran into Mandy Milkovich on my way back to the house earlier.”

Dragging his eyes away from the whiteout took some effort, but Ian managed it. “Which one was she, again?”

“Kinda, like, grungy looking. Fucked up her hair a lot?”

“Oh with the—eyeliner, or whatever?”

“Yeah, that’s her. I guarantee she knows some people who’d be interested in buying from me and Vee, but she hates me, so I’m not sure how I would convince her to get in on it. It would be pretty sweet if I could, though. That would give us an in up around Bridgeport.”

“Bridgeport?” Ian cast around for memories of Mandy Milkovich, and came up with very little. However, he had been pretty sure that when she and Lip were doing whatever they did together, she had only lived a few blocks down. “Her family move or something?”

“Yeah, man. Don’t blame them, either.” At the blank look Ian gave him, Lip did a double take. “What, really? You telling me you don’t know?”

Ian blinked. “I…am telling you I don’t know.”

“They used to live on Trumbull.” Lip paused, the way he did when he thought he had something superior to say. “Over by the L.”

“Okay?” Ian didn’t feel like going along on Lip’s ego trip. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Seriously? That’s right by the House, dude. I would leave, too, if I had to live on that street. Never saw how close she was to it, but she never really wanted to hang out at her place, anyway.” Ian’s face must have still looked blank, because Lip rolled his eyes impatiently. “Oh, come on, Ian. The House. _The. House._ ”

And all of a sudden, yes, Ian _did_ know which house Lip was talking about, because there was only ever one house that people were talking about when they used that tone of voice. The House.

“Oh,” Ian said. “I didn’t know.”

The House. The house that hung at the end of the street like a piece of rotten fruit growing from the L tracks. The house that was like a grey stain on the map that was the South Side, marking the worst corner in a neighborhood made of bad corners. The house that was apparently cursed enough to make a pack of Milkoviches move to Bridgeport.

The cursed house.

And, wait—“Did you tell Mandy about the snow?”

Lip snorted. “Didn’t have to. You can see that shit up the block. I’m not actually sure what she was doing back in the neighborhood, but she seemed plenty happy to laugh at our whole,” Lip paused to wave his hand in a circle, “situation.”

“You probably deserved it,” Ian pointed out. “Did she—would she be able to tell if our house was, like. The same thing as that house?”

“What, cursed?” Lip thought about it. “I doubt it. And I doubt that we’ve got a full-blown curse on our hands. Just some _magical bullshit_.” He laughed, like it was funny.

Ian felt sick.

The House had a reputation in the South Side. Everybody had a story about it, they way everybody who has ever lived in the same neighborhood as a serial killer has a story. Someone walked past the House and got a weird feeling, and the next day their dog was hit by a car; someone’s brother ran onto the porch as a dare, and then OD’d later that month; someone tried to open one of the House’s windows, and it burned off their fingerprints.

Everyone had heard the stories. But there was one that had always stuck out in Ian’s mind.

It featured Frank, home from the Alibi, drunk but not as drunk as sometimes. On the edge of the story was Debbie, small and worked up because Carl had told her that werewolves lived inside the House, and he had taken them her hairbrush so now they had her scent, and that it served her right for ratting on him to Fiona about the Barbie thing.

Ian had been at the table, trying to finish math homework, but it had been late, and maybe he hadn’t been trying very hard. He remembered strange details about that night when he pulled it to the front of his mind now: the exact way the light looked, the dim orange of a failing bulb that couldn’t quite brighten the dining room; the way he had to keep shifting around on his wooden chair, because he had pulled something lifting a too-heavy box at his new job; the way a split in Frank’s lip trickled blood as he spoke.

Frank had said, “Awww, Debbie,” had said, “Don’t believe your brother when he tells you things, he’s a little asshole.” He had said, “I’ll tell you what happened to that house, alright: it was a bunch of self-serving pricks messing around with _magic_. A classic story, the dad—sells drugs, his degenerate _children_ turn on him—a fine citizen, mind you, just trying to do his best like you and me, and, they _pay_ someone to take him out, you know do a little—spell, or what have you, so they can steal all of his cash! The audacity! I wasn’t surprised, of course, kids…they’re just like that, especially these days, you’ll understand when you’re a few years older, Debs, once you’ve popped a few out yourself. But surprise surprise, it backfired. The magic, I mean. Killed the whole family, ruined a perfectly good house. Nothing brings down property values like a haunting.” Frank had stopped to take a drink. “’Course, Tommy’ll tell you a whole different story, but Tommy’s full of shit. He thinks it’s a—a _burial ground_ , or some nonsense, but the house wasn’t always like that.”

Ian remembered Frank scratching his head. He remembered Frank’s sudden, puzzled smile, his teeth sheened a translucent brown from his bloody lip, and the next thing Frank said was the part that Ian remembered, because it was the only part that had seemed remotely true.

“That’s weird, though,” Frank had mused into the mouth of his bottle. “The house _wasn’t_ always like that. But now that I’m thinking about it, I can’t remember what it was like before.”

Ian thought about that moment, one of the few genuine things he had ever heard Frank say, and he thought about Mandy Milkovich never wanting to hang out at her own house, and he thought about life under the influence of a house that wanted you dead.

He left Lip to the living room, and shuffled back up the stairs to bed. The optimistic warmth of that morning seemed a lifetime away as he fell back onto his pillows, tucked his hands behind his head, and wondered about magic.

No one in the family had a knack for it; few people did, in general. Vee was the only person he knew who could work a successful spell, but even her skills were limited. This thing she was cooking up with Lip was nothing short of a miracle: their study aid, their magical sequel to Adderall. What kind of magic would it take to turn a house into the kind of horror show that could kill a dog, or a person, or a family, if any of the stories were to be believed?

What kind of magic would it take to create a personal blizzard?

Ian dozed, and when he awoke, a glance out the curtains revealed that the snow had slowed almost to a stop. That was good, at least, if inexplicable. He hated winter.

Fiona appeared, gave a cursory knock on the half-open door, and stuck her head in. “Plumber’s comin’ in an hour,” she said. “Did you see it’s slowing down out there?”

“Yeah.” Ian’s mouth twisted up into a humorless smile. “By the time the plumber gets here, there won’t be any snow left at all.” He raised a fist in the air, and then released it to mimic an explosion. “Poof. Magic.”

“Yeah, well.” Fiona didn’t look convinced. “Doubt it. But that’s a nice thought, kiddo.” She eased her way out of the room, leaving the door wide open in her wake.

A nice thought. Yeah.

There was no snow when the plumber got there.

*

Mickey was blessedly, blissfully asleep.

Sleep was a favorite activity of Mickey’s. He had liked sleep, before; he would be the first to admit that he had kind of a lazy streak, and Past Mickey had indulged it more often than not. But sleep was a different thing now. It wasn’t just something to do when he was tired, or bored, or procrastinating. Sleep was a way to go somewhere else. Mickey could go to sleep, and check out of his life for hours at a time. If there had been some way for him to sleep all day, or, God, to get his hands on just _some_ of the concoction Mandy was working on and multiply it until he had enough to drown in, he would.

He had considered drowning himself the old fashioned way, once or twice, but he knew now that he would never do it. He had liked his life, when he had been allowed to live it; he couldn’t help but hope that he would be able to live it again someday.

Mickey slept. In his dream, he was outside, in a garden full of weird, old-timey statues, and he was looking for something, digging around the base of a stone woman who was draped in stone fabric. She was standing on the tips of her stone toes to get a better look at something in the distance, and Mickey knelt at her feet like a worshipper.

Dream logic made him think that maybe there was a code or a clue or a mystery carved in to the stone base of the statue, somewhere beneath the soil where he couldn’t quite see, and it seemed like that was what he was looking for. The dirt was damp, and filled his hands in clumps as he pushed it aside.

In his peripheral vision, everything was green. The smell of grass was so strong that he could taste it every time he breathed in, and so he breathed as deeply as he could. He thought, though, that maybe he could breathe even deeper than that; so on the next breath, he did. It was like a game, the breathing, the filling his chest up and up and up with green air—but no, he was looking for clues, right, because he was on a treasure hunt, or something. He didn’t know, not really. He didn’t particularly care. He just knew that it felt good to have his hands in the earth, and it was a good dream, so good, until the statue’s mouth opened and said, “Ian Gallagher.”

The statue’s voice was somehow both sultry and weary. It was a little too familiar; it slashed across his dream until the green blinked away, and instead of sweet, summery air, all he could taste was the stale reality of his own mouth.

“The fuck,” he mumbled. The words landed somewhere between his forearm and the slightly damp couch cushion, because apparently he had been drooling. Great.

“Ian Gallagher,” Drina repeated, in a bored tone that indicated just how impressed she was with having to repeat herself all the time.

The strength required for Mickey to heave himself off of the couch was incalculable. If you didn’t count sleeping and remodeling, there wasn’t much to do inside but work out, and his arms ached; but aside from that, there was a dull spot of despair that always seemed to live right beneath his sternum, and his eyes were just…heavy.

Drina shouldn’t get to have all the fun. Mickey tried the name out: “Ian Gallagher.” It tasted better than his sleep breath, at least. It fit well in his mouth.

Ian Gallagher must have been someone he knew before. Not someone he knew well, maybe, but when he spoke the name it came with images: red hair, and a mess of freckles so dark and populous that they could be a tan, and a Little League jersey that hung awkwardly, the way only a hand-me-down does.

So, Ian Gallagher was a kid from the neighborhood. A kid from the brief time that Mickey had participated in team sports? He would have been, what, ten years old? That seemed like a lifetime ago.

The inside of Mickey’s head started to spin in a sick, disorienting way. His breathing came fast and shallow, like that of a wounded animal, and the living room lurched around him. This happened sometimes when he considered the past, when he tried to place himself in time. He had been alone for far too long.

He couldn’t remember ten very well.

He couldn’t remember now very well.

Maybe he could ask Mandy. She would know, about then and about now.

Mandy would tell him what day it was.

Mandy was going to bring him a calendar.

Mandy was scrawny and young, with hair chopped to her jaw, and she was kneeling on the counter to pull a package of popcorn out of a cupboard.

Mandy was a preteen mound of blankets on the futon in his room, because someone else had passed out in her bed.

Mandy was pink haired and smiling and telling him something—

For a moment, time was a wet cloth over his face, disorienting him, making it difficult to breath. Mickey pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes in an attempt to recenter himself. He worried at the corner of his bottom lip.

It didn’t work. Time was a pair of shoes he had worn the soles off of. Time was a tornado of water that circled the bathtub drain: each memory blurred into the next, jumped gaps, leaked over barriers, and it was hard to remember how far away from ten years old he was now, at whatever age he was. He had known how old he was earlier, but now it was all the same. He gasped from moment to moment like a fish hurtling between puddles.

“Ian _Gallagher_ ,” Drina insisted.

“Fuck _off_ ,” Mickey bellowed back, out of nothing but instinct, because Jesus, fuck, he had heard her, he _got_ it. But her interruption had done the trick, because the room steadied, and Mickey was once again moored in his body.

Someone on the porch cleared their throat.

Out of spite, Mickey left the door shut until he heard footsteps retreating down the stairs. Only then did he crack it, and—yeah, there was the red hair, already far enough away to be nothing more than a bright spot against the sidewalk.

 

The most surprising thing was that Ian Gallagher kept coming back.

Mickey knew the rumors about his house. Death and destruction, abduction, bodily harm and life long consequences and _magic_ in a way that people were terrified of. There was a reason he didn’t get very many visitors.

It was all bullshit, of course, just hearsay and panic based on a series of coincidences. Or, more likely, all of the stories about the house were just a string of rumors started by Terry Milkovich to keep Mickey isolated. But still. People believed what they wanted to. Mickey couldn’t tell if Ian Gallagher was brave for ignoring the warning signs, or if he was the worst kind of idiot for taking his chances.

The second time the guy showed up, Mickey watched him from a slit in the curtains, and there was this, at least: Gallagher was cautious. He never tried to touch the walls or the windows of the house. He didn’t leave anything behind, or take anything with him. He didn’t seem to be there to get fucked up, or to prove something to someone. He just sort of wandered around, scratched at the dirt, squinted at things.

Mickey could not figure out why the fuck he was there.

The third time, Gallagher wandered up all ten steps, sprawled out flat on the porch like a cat in the sun, and fell asleep.

Mickey was fucking baffled. His knife was clutched in one hand, mostly out of instinct, but also because he had been carving an ocean of tiny waves onto the windowsill; his other hand held the curtain back, and he stared through the gap for at least an hour. Ian was like a movie that he couldn’t look away from.

The freckles were still there, but much lighter now, occasional smudges rather than the heavy stamps Mickey remembered. His clothes fit better than they had when he was a kid. His hair was so, so red.

The sun made him look like he was glowing.

Mickey was in something of a daze: confusion and admiration and anxiety and just a hint of good, old-fashioned lust were crowding up from his stomach and into his throat, so he was not at all prepared for Gallagher to stretch awake. It was all very sudden, the way he woke up. There was a twitch of the mouth and a pinch of the eyebrows, and then his big eyes blinked open. They caught immediately on Mickey’s, as if drawn there.

They stared at each other. Mickey’s heart was pounding, pounding, and his breathing was coming fast like it used to when he was running from the cops. And it was strange, because Mickey had wanted to be recognized, or remembered, or even just written into the stories that were told about the house, but it was an entirely different thing to be faced with it.

Discovery looked like a tired kid in jeans and a flannel shirt, and Mickey was dazzled.

He let the curtain fall shut.

 

The night of Ian Gallagher’s fourth visit was a night for beginnings.

Mickey had carved himself a circle on the kitchen floor, and was settled at its center. He was a magician, goddamnit, and it was about time for him to do some magic.

Getting out of the house had been an all-consuming obsession at first, for months or years, and Mickey had tried everything he could think of to achieve it: opening spells, unlocking charms, small explosives, brute strength, shoddy counter-curses concocted from the meager supplies that were available to him. Escape had burned at him like a fever, but when nothing worked, he just—gave up. Failed. Drifted away from himself.

But lately, he had been thinking. In his desperation, Mickey had been throwing cures at an unknown ailment, which, in retrospect, was a shitty fucking idea. What he needed was to know exactly what kind of curse he was working against, in order to attack it with something that was designed to work.

So here he was, cross-legged on the floor, cradling a soup pot full of burning tampons.

And, okay. Mandy had left them in the house, in the back corner of the bathroom cabinet, and Mickey needed something to burn that he wouldn’t miss once it was ash. It wasn’t like Mandy was gonna use them. It wasn’t like _Mickey_ was gonna use them. So, tampons. He had peeled away the crinkly wrappers, and pushed the cotton out of the plastic what-the-fucks—and Jesus, if he hadn’t been gay before, he sure was now—and then coated the whole pile with gobs of Vaseline.

What he did next was something very badass, something that he had rarely been allowed to do before because it scared his dad into the kind of flying terror that manifested as rage: he stared into the pot and let his eyes go blurry, let his fingertips go numb, and he conjured up a memory of a sparkler shocking against his skin one Fourth of July. He held that memory in his mind until his mouth tasted like a campfire, until he was shivering. When he refocused his eyes, the contents of his pot were edged in electric orange and were streaming smoke.

Mickey released the breath he had been holding, slowly, slowly, and, as he did, the bright beginnings of fire crept upwards into flames.

Magic. It was all about intent.

He breathed in, and asked his first question: _is the curse attached to the house?_ He dropped a few crumbles of drywall into the pot, and breathed out. At first, there was nothing—but then, decisively, the flames shrunk to a low flicker.

So, no. Mickey had been expecting that. Curses were usually about people, not places.

He breathed in, and asked his second question: _is the curse attached to me?_ He brought up his hunting knife, and pressed the sharp end of the gut hook to his fingertip; for just a moment, he was a kid, fat-fingered and bored, pestering his Aunt Rande while she checked her blood sugar until she let him bleed on his very own test strip—but no, he was here, he was now, he needed to stay focused. He squeezed a few drops of blood into the pot, and breathed out.

The fire held—and then dropped low again. Another no.

This, Mickey had not been expecting. In fact, he was blown away. His mouth went dry. He was aware, in a distant sort of way, that his ears were ringing. The corners of his eyes burned, too, but with water instead of fire. He wasn’t cursed.

_He wasn’t cursed._

But if he wasn’t cursed, then what was?

Mickey was gulping in breath for his third question, when, from the living room, Drina said, “Ian Gallagher.”

The breath rushed out, and Mickey went very still. Sure enough, he could hear ten distant footfalls, one for each stair, and then several clunks as Gallagher crossed the porch. And then, in a muffled voice, Ian Gallagher said, “Open the door.”

Mickey wasn’t going to open the door. He did cover the pot with its lid, though, so the flames would die out. Just to avoid accidental spellwork. Just so he could listen better.

“I know you’re in there,” Gallagher persisted.

The kid didn’t know shit. Mickey pushed the pot away, edged it over the line of his scratched-in circle, and stood up. He wasn’t going to open the door.

He crept into the living room.

“Come on,” Ian insisted. He was beginning to sound desperate. “I need your help.”

Through the gap in the curtain, Mickey’s eyes caught on Ian’s, and he stared. He wasn’t going to open the door. He wasn’t.

“Please,” Ian said.

Mickey opened the door.

His heart was a hummingbird. He cleared his throat, raised his eyebrows, and willed his voice to remain flat. Ian’s face was earnest, gentle, very pale. It was annoying.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Mickey complained, and it sounded good, sounded convincing. He was putting on his personality like a costume, like a layer of defense, just to see if Gallagher would buy it. There was no need to let on that his body was too small to contain the dust devil of emotion he was feeling.

“I told you. I need your help.” Ian was a little wild around the eyes, puffy around the mouth. His hair was just long enough to show that his hands had been running through it.

Mickey believed him.

There wasn’t much Mickey could offer in the way of help, but Ian must be desperate. He probably thought he was speaking to some kind of psychopath, or maybe a ghost, and the thought electrified Mickey in a way he couldn’t quite explain. He couldn’t remember the last time he had spoken to anyone aside from Mandy; even his last day of freedom, with his dad and the witch and the way they had trapped him, was fuzzy. But beneath the blurred days and the scrambled thoughts, Mickey knew he still existed, same as always, because when he opened his mouth, he said, “I don’t do favors.”

Ian barely hesitated: he had been prepared for this. “I can pay you.”

Mickey snorted, and rubbed at the edge of his mouth with his thumb. He thought about how much to tell Ian. Maybe, for once, the truth would be the best plan of action here. Worryingly, there was an inexplicable part of him that _wanted_ to tell Ian the truth.

He went for it. “No you can’t. I can’t leave this fuckin’ house, man.” Mickey reached out to the open air in front of him, and felt the familiar, shuddering zap of his imprisonment. He nodded toward the faint ripples his touch had left in the air. “See that? I can’t take money from you, can’t spend money. Does me no good.”

The look on Ian’s face was difficult to classify. Shocked? Maybe not: the kid’s house had been snowing the other day, according to Mandy. Uncomfortable? Certainly. Taken aback? For sure. Mickey smiled sardonically.

Ian was quick to bounce back, however. His face was incredibly expressive. Mickey found that he could watch his thoughts flicker past like a stop motion video, that Ian’s expression settled when his mind did. “Do you have any family, then? That I could pay instead, like. As a favor? Or, actually, I’ve got,” and Ian pulled a bag of tiny, lavender-colored pills out from one of his deep pockets. “This is how I got the money to pay you in the first place. My brother and my sister’s friend invented them.” The note of pride in Ian’s voice was unmistakable.

Mickey almost changed his mind about wanting to talk to this kid. His brother, obviously, was Lip fucking Gallagher. Disgusting. Inventive genius or not, Mandy seemed to think the guy was a real shithead, and Mickey remembered enough of him from school to believe it. “Great,” Mickey deadpanned. “What are they, fuckin’ boner pills? That how your brother gets it up?”

“No, asshole.” Mickey was almost impressed by Ian’s instant slip into this scowling, defensive thing, but then he remembered that he didn’t pose any real threat to Ian, anyway, so there was no reason for Ian to put up a front. “They’re study aids. Memory magic, but in pill form. We’ve been selling them for thirty bucks a pill, but I bet you could get more from the right people. Rich North Side kids, people with chronic memory problems, you know.”

And, okay, that was actually kind of interesting. It was a good fucking idea, Mickey would give that to Ian’s douchebag brother. Memory magic was tricky. The spell was actually an easier one, pretty common ingredients, but the longevity was for shit unless someone with a lot of juice was conjuring it up. And even then, the side effects tended to be annoying when the spell wore off, and reversing the side effects required a counter-memory spell…the whole thing was just a lot of work, and finding someone who could do it wasn’t easy in the first place. But, the pill thing. That was smart. And it didn’t have to be perfect, as long as they were getting paid. Mandy had plenty of connections from selling the shit they already concocted together. With this, they could make some real money, or at least keep the lights on.

Ian must have been able to see the consideration in Mickey’s face, because he grinned like he had won. Mickey shot his eyebrows back up in warning. That was one thing about Milkoviches: they had eyebrows sharp enough to do damage. “Alright, say I want in on this. How do I know you’ll follow through?”

Mickey expected a predictable answer, _because I don’t want to get cursed_ or _because I don’t want your family to put me in a meat grinder._ Instead, what Ian said, quietly, steadily, was, “Because I want a real opinion, and that won’t come for free.”

Nobody else would say that and mean it, but Ian seemed to be sincere.

“Yeah,” Mickey said, after a beat. “Okay.” He leaned against the door. “My sister distributes some similar shit already, I’ll get you two in contact and you can figure prices out with her. Don’t even _think_ about fucking her over.” Mickey thought about it for a second. “Or fucking her, in general. She’s fucking vicious when she wants to be.”

Ian nodded, though he didn’t look sufficiently terrified, in Mickey’s opinion. But Ian dug out his phone, and Mickey rattled off Mandy’s phone number, still memorized from the days when he watched over her instead of the other way around.

“Okay.” Ian slid his phone back into his pocket, and took a deep, halting breath—but, as if he has just remembered something, he stopped and said, “Oh, hey—what’s your name?”

Mickey blinked. Blinked again. He didn’t want to tell him, just like he hadn’t wanted to open the door. He wanted to say, _none of your fucking business._ But he made the mistake of looking Ian in the eyes, and something just—tugged loose in his chest. Before he knew it, his mouth opened. “Mickey,” he said, helpless to do anything else.

“Mickey.” Ian repeated. “Okay. Mickey, I think my house is cursed.”

Mickey waited.

“It’s—all of this bizarre shit keeps happening. It started snowing the other day, over just our house, nowhere else, then there was no snow at all left after like five hours—and I’m talking feet of snow, a _blizzard’s_ worth of snow. And then we were putting the pool away the other day, and we were talking about how old it was, and it just crumbled in our hands as soon as we touched it. And I mean, we had been swimming in it last week. It’s like the house is listening to us.” Ian was working himself up, bordering again on frantic. “Yesterday, I opened the laundry chute, and about a thousand fucking rats poured out. We spent all night decontaminating.” His hand came up to touch the same patch of flaking paint that Mandy had been picking at just the other day. “I’ve been over here a few times, trying to see if there’s, like—a feeling that exists around a curse, or some sort of sign I should be looking for, but all I found was you, so.”

A curse. Jesus fuck. The last thing Mickey needed was another fucking curse to deal with.

“ _Great_ story,” he said disdainfully. This was the point in the conversation where the old Mickey would have taken a drag off his cigarette, and blown it in Gallagher’s face. Fuck, he missed smoking.

“You’re an asshole, huh?” Ian wasn’t really asking; in fact, he looked irritated on top of all the desperate exhaustion.

Mickey held back a grin. Mandy was gonna love this kid. “Okay, I’m an asshole. But what do you want me to do about all your problems, exactly? Not like I’m great at fixing cursed houses, here.” Mickey waved a hand to indicate his general situation.

Ian trailed the hand with his eyes, and then abruptly looked away. “You can do magic, can’t you?” Again, not really a question, but an observation. An unsettling one. Something that no one should mention so casually.

The odd, numb feeling returned to Mickey’s extremities. “How the fuck would you know that?” he asked, voiced dropped low.

Ian shrugged. “Nothing can come in or out of that house, apparently. But somehow, you’re alive.” His hands fluttered out toward the space in front of the door, almost like he wanted to touch, like he couldn’t help it. At the last minute, Ian snatched his hands back and stuck them in his pockets, as if to prevent them from wandering again. “Look. I think everything is pointing toward a curse at my house, but my sisters think I’m being pessimistic, and my brother thinks that it’s not a curse at all, just something else going haywire. And I think that you could tell me what I should be looking for.”

Mickey’s brain faltered, dropped into a buzz that matched the one already twitching in his fingers. _It’s not a curse at all, just something else going haywire_.

He thought of his pot of fire. He thought of the hours he had spent assuming that there was only one answer to his situation. _Just something else._

No wonder he’d never made any progress in escaping. He had never considered that he had been dealing with anything other than a curse.

“Uh, Mickey—” Ian ducked his head a little to meet Mickey’s eyes. Fucker was tall. “What—”

“I’ll get back to you,” Mickey cut in, dazed. Ian’s mouth was moving, a soft pink smudge in a sea of night-dark shapes, and Mickey didn’t want to look at it. Somehow, still, it was all he could see.

“But you haven’t—”

“I’ll get back to you,” Mickey repeated, and closed the door.

Mickey’s awareness of the house around him was nonexistent, but for the worn path that wove through the living room, around the couch and into the kitchen. Mickey followed it on instinct, numbly, dreamily, and settled back into his circle on the floor.

 _Not a curse_. That could change everything.

It was a night for beginnings, so Mickey began again.

*

The way Ian saw it, there were two problems. Well, actually, there were many, many problems, but they fell into two categories.

The first problem was that things in Ian’s life kept going to shit in bizarre, inconvenient ways. One minute, he and Carl were talking about how the pool was starting to fall apart, and the next, it did, right under their fingertips. Small scratching noises in the wall were manifesting into rats upon rats upon rats, tumbling from the laundry chute like waste from a sewage pipe. And there was, of course, the snow.

Nobody could figure out what was going on. The whole family—well, the whole family minus Frank—had piled around the dining room table and written down the name of every person they could think of who might have a vendetta against a Gallagher. Understandably, the list was long. Unfortunately, it was also far from comprehensive: it included everyone from family members to exes to the priest over at St. Mary’s, and still didn’t come close to cataloguing every possibility. There was even a special entry in the list that just said “people Frank has fucked over” with a question mark next to it. That one question mark probably represented thousands of people, so, really, they had no idea where to start.

Fiona did some digging, and ruled out a few people. Vee tried to scry for the perpetrator in a salad bowl filled with box wine, but what little magic Vee had was more suited to healing, so nothing came of it, except that Ian got to steal a mug of wine.

The house had been magic-free for two days, and everyone was on edge waiting for the other shoe to drop.

That was the first problem. The second problem was named Mickey, and, of the two, it was the one Ian was most interested in solving.

Ian felt like he spent every extra second thinking about Mickey: about the shock of seeing him in the window that first time, about how every sharp look or gesture had dug its way into Ian’s chest in little jolts, about his expressive eyes and his filthy clothes. Ian hadn’t told anyone about his research missions to the House, partially because he knew that they would respond with no small amount of horror. But the biggest reason he had decided to keep the whole thing a secret was that, regarding Mickey, he felt as though he had poked his nose into a disused corner and discovered something rare and strange.

In none of the stories did Ian remember any mention of the House being inhabited; in all of them was an anecdote about some instance of suffering that the House had caused. So far, Ian didn’t feel any more cursed than he had before going to the House, but he _had_ learned something than no one else seemed to know. So what if Mickey was a little strange, or more than a little terrifying? He was intriguing, and so far there hadn’t been any horrible fallout from getting near him. If Ian wanted to keep going back to see him, it was no one else’s business at all.

There was also the fact that Mickey might be able to get some answers for Ian. Maybe it was a leap to explore the only other cursed house in town to try and figure out your own, but to Ian it felt like logic. He had been afraid, at first: he wasn’t immune to the stories, even if he didn’t really believe them. But he hadn’t come away from the House harmed, not even once, which seemed to Ian like further proof that Frank was full of shit.

What Ian did come away with was a new business prospect. He had kept the details vague, but Lip had seemed enthusiastic when Ian mentioned that he had found a new hook up for the memory aids. Mickey’s sister wasn’t particularly responsive through text, but Ian had managed to get her to agree to a meeting to discuss things. So his plan for the day was to meet up with her, hammer out some details, exchange some tiny, valuable pills, and, finally, visit Mickey.

Just for an update. Certainly not because he wanted to decipher the guy’s knuckle tattoos, or get another look at the face he made when he was trying to be intimidating.

So when Fiona hammered on their door in the morning, Ian got up as usual. He raced Debbie to the shower and won, flicked Carl’s overhanging foot with a rubber band until he grumbled awake, and ate scrambled eggs standing over the kitchen counter.

It was a school morning, and no one argued otherwise. They had all had enough of snow days.

At seven-fifteen, Ian exchanged a meaningful look with Lip, and then announced that he had left his math binder at work the night before, so he was going to head out early. Fiona waved him off with a reminder to ask Kash if he could take home the last of that month’s expired bread. Lip, Ian’s lifelong partner in crime, said casually that he would catch up to him at school.

Ian, of course, wasn’t going to school. Instead, he was selling pills to a girl who might want to kill him.

In movies, teens met up in cafes or coffee shops or wholesome neighborhood parks. They always had money for lattes and, like, fancy-ass scones. Little slices of cake made out of vegetables, or whatever. Whatever it was that rich shitheads ate. They definitely never found needles underneath the slide in their subdivision’s playground.

Because Ian didn’t live in a movie, he and Mickey’s sister were meeting under the L like self-respecting South Siders. There was a couch that someone had dumped a few years back, and it was something of a landmark, despite the state it was in from surviving Chicago winters. Nobody ever sat on it but for the very drunk or the very desperate, but when you asked someone to meet you by the ratty blue couch, they knew exactly where you meant.

Ian was there early. The pea-sized lavender pills weighed heavily in his pocket, and while he waited for Mickey’s mysterious sister to arrive, he played a game where he imagined how desperate he would have to be to take one of them.

It wasn’t necessarily common knowledge amongst the people they were selling to, at least not until afterwards, but the side effects could be highly inconvenient. Near the end of the pills’ spell cycle, things began going wrong for the people who had taken them—not in the way of the random household mishaps the Gallaghers had been experiencing, but more like the universe trying to dig out all the gaps the spell had filled in. Like after a week of being able to reach into the past and say, “Yes, this happened,” the things you planned to have happen in the near future began to fail in bizarre ways. You might announce you were going to sleep, and then sit up all night in a drowsy bout of insomnia; you might plan to meet someone for lunch at two-thirty and then not reach the restaurant until five, even though you had left at two o’clock and only driven for twenty minutes.

Maybe there were things so worth remembering that it would make sense to take on the side effects, tests that would be worth fucking up your week to pass. But most things, Ian didn’t want to remember. He found that if an experience was good enough that he wanted to hang on to it, he would just search out the experience a second time. Smoking with Lip, blowing shit up with Carl, even fucking around with Kash, for the brief time that had gone on—those were things worth remembering, but going out and doing it again was always better than thinking about the last time it had happened.

Sometimes, Ian couldn’t decide if he didn’t understand other people, or if his stakes just weren’t high enough that he had to understand them.

The wind that morning had a bite to it that felt like fall on its way out, like real winter. It felt like change in the air. The tough grass poking up through the dirt and gravel wasn’t quite brown yet, but it was trying to get there, and the feeling of time passing hit Ian suddenly.

He was starting to get antsy, to feel like he had better things to do than wait around for a deal that might not be worth it in the first place, when he saw her coming.

It retrospect, Ian should have known. Beneath the eyeliner and the hair, which was black now but hadn’t always been, she and Mickey had the same sharp nose, the same chilly eyes and wicked brows. To be fair, he hadn’t seen her in a long time, and hadn’t seen much of her anyway, even when she was around—but still. The resemblance was obvious, now that Ian knew to look for it.

The thing was, though, that Ian hadn’t gone out that morning expecting Mandy Milkovich.

Mandy sauntered up, dressed all in black but for a grey beanie that had obviously seen better days. Her hands were shoved in her jacket pockets. Ian bet that at least one of them was curled around a knife.

“I came to see a man about some drugs,” Mandy said with profound disinterest, as she came to a stop in front of Ian.

A million things raced through Ian’s mind in a single moment: _what_ and _how_ and _when_ and _what the fuck_ , but what came out was, “Hey, Mandy,” and then, “I didn’t know you had a brother.”

Mandy rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well. I wish I didn’t know that _you_ had a brother. And I’ve got three of them, for the record.”

As soon as she said it, flashes of the Milkoviches came back to Ian, from school and just from seeing them around the neighborhood: he remembered the burly, stupid one, and the skinny, weaselly one, hanging in the background of his vague memories of Mandy, but he did not, _did not_ , remember Mickey. He was sure that if he and Mickey had ever met, he would not have been able to forget it.

“Really?” Ian asked. His forehead wrinkled in confusion. “And—that means you used to live in the House, right? Lip said you lived there. Or, well, he didn’t know where you lived, but I guess it’s kinda obvious now. But, you left.” He hesitated, but only just. “Has Mickey ever been able to leave?”

Mandy’s shot him a look. “You’re goddamn nosy, aren’t you? Okay: I used to live there; I don’t anymore. And Mickey’s only been in there for a couple of years, obviously. The house wasn’t always like that.” She pushed out a long breath, and it was a cold enough morning that it came out as a cloud of mist. “It’s none of your business, anyway.”

 _The House wasn’t always like that_. Isn’t that what Frank had said? But— “The stories have been around forever, though. Since we were kids. And Mickey didn’t go to school or anything. I never saw him around.”

Disdain seemed to be the natural state of Mandy’s face, because the glare she gave Ian was drenched in it. “I _said_ it was none of your business. And, anyway, I don’t know what you’ve been smoking,” she said, eyebrows raised scornfully, “but it’s not what I’m here for. Unless what you’ve been smoking is memory magic, in which case I’m still going to sell it and make a shitload of money, so. Hand it over, please.”

Right. Pills. Seeing Mandy had made him forget why he was here. He couldn’t wait to tell Lip who he had met up with: the look on his brother’s face when he found out that Ian had succeeded where Lip had not would be priceless.

Or maybe he wouldn’t tell Lip. Maybe Mandy should stay tucked into the same secret mental folder he had filed Mickey in.

“Sure,” Ian said, finally. “Of course.” He dug the bag out of his pocket, dropped it into Mandy’s open hand, and watched Mandy count the pills to make sure he hadn’t tried to short her. “It’s all there,” he added pointlessly; if he were her, he would count them, too. “The side effects—”

“Are shitty, yeah,” she interrupted. She tucked the pills into her cleavage, which Ian suddenly realized he could see a lot of, for some reason. “I’m not stupid. I’ll ask Mickey about it, he might know how to counteract them. I’ll give this batch a shot; if they sell, then next time we can talk about cutting you guys in.”

“Hey— _no_ ,” Ian protested, “that’s not—”

“Last I heard, my brother was doing you a favor,” Mandy said. Her eyes raked over Ian like blades—and then, inexplicably, they seemed to soften. “Look,” she amended, “as long as you promise not to share with your douchebag brother, maybe you and I can work something out. You can buy me french fries, or something.” Mandy’s mouth curled into a small, mischievous smile. “Mickey could probably use a friend other than me. I guess I should be trying to get you to stick around.”

“Yeah, probably,” Ian answered dumbly. The word _Mickey_ seemed to be a lot louder than the word _money_ in his brain, and it made Mandy seem very reasonable.

Mandy gave him a thumbs up, and then a middle finger, and left.

Immediately, Ian’s hands curled in on themselves like question marks; he could feel his pulse in the tips of his fingers, asking _Mickeymickeymickey_ against his palms.

He started walking.

The sky felt huge overhead, far away and clouding over, but Ian might as well have been flying through it on his way to the House. He could hardly feel his feet touch the ground. The path there was familiar by now, and he was closer to the House than usual after meeting with Mandy, so his legs took him there on instinct. Each broken bottle stepped over, each weed struggling through a crack in the pavement, was transformed from an insignificant detail into a tiny landmark on the way to Mickey. Everything on Ian’s path was made exceptional by association.

The House wasn’t much from the street. There was a fence, a path, a scrubby patch of yard with trash accumulated in its corners. Even the cursed House on Trumbull wasn’t immune to the gardens of refuse that leapt up in every unwatched corner of the South Side. It sported three ground level windows, a second triad of higher windows looking onto the street, and a brick exterior in need of a good power wash that it would likely never receive. It was thoroughly, profoundly unspectacular.

There were ten steps up to the porch, and each one was a solid, memorable pressure against the bottoms of Ian’s feet, much more real than any other part of his walk over.

He didn’t knock on the door. He knew better. At first, Ian hadn’t tried to knock, hadn’t tried to touch anything, because he didn’t know what might happen if he did. After his first visit had left him unscathed, Ian had tried something that was arguably stupider than touching the house: he had laid down to sleep on the porch, exhausted from worry and content with the knowledge that no one would be brave enough to come onto the property to bother him. The House hadn’t punished him for that, either, so he had gone back again, to see if there was anything there, anything worth seeing at all, and he had found Mickey, who had shown him that there was no point in trying to knock, anyway.

Ian stood on the porch until the curtain flashed open. He waited while Mickey considered him, and then watched as the door opened.

“What,” Mickey grunted. His arms were crossed; he eyed Ian as if he were a worrisome growth rather than an expected houseguest.

Ian had terrible fucking taste in guys.

But, okay, it was hard to believe that while he was actually looking at Mickey. Maybe Mickey needed a shower and an attitude adjustment, but there was something about the low flicker of his eyelashes, the soft shape of his mouth, the graceful curve of his neck and jaw in contrast with the capable stockiness of his body, that hit Ian like a fist in his gut.

“The fuck you lookin’ at?” Apparently Mickey’s patience was running out.

Forget everything; Ian was definitely an idiot.

“I wanted to check in,” Ian said lamely.

“Okay?” Mickey’s eyebrows jumped up, ready to mock Ian without a second’s hesitation. He spread his hands as if to say _is that all you’ve got_ , and Ian caught a better look at his hands, at the tattoos. Ian was pretty sure that they said _fuck u-up_ , which did not bode well for Ian’s self-preservation. It seemed like the kind of thing Mickey would have tattooed across his knuckles, anyway.

It also seemed like the kind of thing Ian would have remembered, if Mickey had really been around the way Mandy said he had been. It was absurd that Mickey had existed all this time without Ian’s knowledge, and maybe that was an odd thing to think in the first place, but there was a chunk of time where the Milkoviches had been all over the place. It wasn’t like they were some random family; they had traveled in the same circles as the Gallaghers. They had crafted a reputation for themselves.

Ian should know Mickey, but he didn’t. Mickey was just some guy. Some guy who was living under magical confinement, and who wanted everyone to know that he could fuck them up, and who Ian didn’t know anything about.

Feeling suddenly weighed down by it all, Ian sank down to kneel on the porch, and then kicked out into a sprawl.

Mickey seemed bewildered. “You—what, settling in for the winter? Hope you’re not expectin’ a long conversation, man. I got shit to do.”

Ian shrugged. “So do I.”

“Jesus fuck,” Mickey breathed, and then, after a moment’s hesitation, he dropped to sit on the floor, too. He and Ian were reflections of each other, and the doorway was the mirror they both lived in. “Well, shit. Whatever. I’d invite you in for fuckin’ tea, but, y’know.” He produced a lethal looking knife from somewhere beyond Ian’s line of sight, and began rhythmically flicking it into the floor. “So, hey, how’s life as a cursed man?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” Ian tried not to look directly at Mickey. It was hard to remember what he was there for when he did. He focused on the wood grain of the splintering porch, instead. “Here’s a question: why don’t I remember you from school?”

Mickey gave Ian a small, sarcastic smile, which Ian accidentally saw because he was terrible at following his own rules. Ian refocused on the porch, zeroing in on a tiny hole in the plank nearest his right hand.

“Wow, way to make a guy feel special, Gallagher.” Mickey shifted the handle of his knife in his palm, and then threw it down. _Thunk_. “Look, I dunno. I didn’t really show up to school that often, maybe your head was too far up your brother’s ass to notice when I made an appearance.”

Ian ignored the slight, figuring that it was directed more toward Lip than him. He didn’t know what exactly had gone down between his brother and Mandy, but based on Lip’s track record, he was pretty sure that Lip deserved whatever he got. “No, really. I remember your brothers, and Mandy. I even remember your dad, from the Alibi. But I don’t remember you.” Ian took a breath, a deep one, to try and suppress the fluttering in his stomach. He didn’t look at Mickey, he didn’t, he didn’t. “I would have remembered you.”

Mickey was quiet for a moment. He _thunk_ ed his knife into the floor one more time, and left it there. “We were in Little League together. You and me. Not like we were friends, or anything, but you look enough like you did then that I recognize you. You were, like, a fuckin’ overachiever, man. Coach was always fallin’ all over himself about you, ‘cause you could run so fast.” He chuckled, a small, rough sound. “Fucker kicked me out after I pissed on first base. Thought you were gonna fall over laughing when I did it.” Mickey cleared his throat strangely; it seemed that it was difficult for him to sort out what he was saying. “You remember any of that?”

“No.” Ian looked at Mickey now, because he had to. It was too hard to do otherwise.

It shouldn’t have been hard at all.

Mickey was nodding, a slow, unsurprised movement. His eyes were distant, and looked more than a little glazed. “Guess that makes sense. For what it’s worth, I don’t remember much of you after that, either.” Mickey ran a hand through his hair, and, as he did so, Ian realized with a complicated little jolt that Mickey had washed his hair since the last time they had seen one another. His face, too. Everything about him looked much softer when it was clean.

All at once, not being able to touch Mickey became fiercely difficult. Ian’s whole world narrowed down to the unshakeable feeling that he needed to line his leg up with Mickey’s, bump their shoes together, light up a cigarette and slide it into Mickey’s mouth. Ian’s opinion had changed since the morning: he was starting to understand the appeal of the memory pills. If Mickey lived anywhere in his memory, Ian wanted to dig him out.

“It’s hard for me, sometimes. To remember, I mean,” Mickey continued. He reached up to touch the side of his mouth, briefly, absently. “I’ve been locked up in here for too fuckin’ long. Shit gets all scrambled around.” He gave Ian a long, far-away look, and then glanced away. He picked his knife back up, and resumed hefting it into the floor. “Don’t even know why I’m talkin’ ‘bout this shit, anyway. Hey, here’s some good news: turns out I’m not cursed at all, just fuckin’ stupid.”

“You’re not stupid,” Ian said automatically, and then frowned. “Wait, there’s no curse?”

“Nope!” Mickey grinned, a big, cheery looking thing that felt somehow dangerous. “Still can’t figure out why the fuck I’m in here, though.”

It actually made sense, that there was no curse. Ian had never left the House feeling any worse than when he had arrived, and if Mickey had existed outside of the House for most of his life, then the years of panicked stories surrounding the place would have to have been fabricated. “What about my house?” Ian asked. Maybe it was selfish of him, but he was curious. “Do you think mine isn’t cursed, either?

Mickey actually laughed. “I’d almost forgotten about all of your shit. Good news there, too. It was a little harder to tell, since I don’t have any of your blood or anything.” Here, he sent Ian a mischievous, sideways look, clearly hoping that the sentence would startle him. Ian purposefully kept his face blank, and Mickey rolled his eyes. “Alright, you’re no fuckin’ fun. So, I looked into things for you, and I don’t think you’re dealing with a curse, either.”

“That’s good news, right?” Ian couldn’t help but feel relieved. That would make Fiona feel better, at least.

“Hold on, Gallagher, don’t get too far ahead of yourself.” The knife went into the floor once, twice, three times. “As far as I can tell, whatever’s going on at your house is coming from you.”

*

There was an in-between place Mickey went to sometimes, when it was too hard to be himself, and all he had to do to get there was stop being able to feel his body.

He could pass hours that way, if he had to. He had gotten good at it. Spending as much time alone as he did had the tendency to feel like waiting in line, or being stopped at a long stoplight when you had somewhere you were really trying to go. All he had to do was lean in to that feeling.

It was like this: you were driving, okay, and maybe you weren’t technically supposed to be in the car you were in, because eventually someone was gonna notice that it was gone and report it as stolen; and, anyway, your stupid fucking uncle took the plates off already, so it looked fuckin’ suspicious. And you had just gotten your license, your real one, and this was the first time you were doing this kind of shit alone. But it was going pretty smoothly, so far. You were getting the car where it needed to go, following the speed limits, no bullshit, no cops.

Except: you hit a red light. And it was red, and red, and red, and red some more; and suddenly you were not a person driving a car, but a disembodied brain with one hundred percent of its focus on that red light. All you wanted was for it to turn green. It transcended thought. The edgeless desire for the light to change got rid of all the rest of you, made you into nothing except a stopped thing praying to go.

But the light stayed red. And for several terrifying minutes, you became convinced that the light would never turn, and that you would stay in front of that red light, unmoving and stuck, for however long you continued to exist.

Of course, eventually, the light would turn green. And you would have a body again, and you would drive the car, and you wouldn’t get caught this time.

That had happened to Mickey a long time ago, or maybe not, but it was one of the moments that felt closer than others when the timeline in Mickey’s head became tangled. He used it to his advantage, now: he would palm Frosted Flakes into his mouth, park himself at the proverbial stoplight, and get lost for hours.

Later, time would restart, and he would finish whatever he had started before slipping into that in-between place—he would throw the empty cereal bag into his dad’s old room, where he put all his trash, or do push ups, or consider jacking off. Anything he did, though, would be dulled at the edges, blurry and unreal and pointless. Leaving like that took part of him away, for a while.

Ian Gallagher was the opposite of that.

Ian was a project. A curiosity. A reason to open the door or light a fucking fire or think of the future as something that might, eventually, arrive. Ian was a red light turning green.

Mandy had been by to visit again, all smug and shitty, talking about how Lip Gallagher’s kid brother had grown up nice, didn’t he think? Kid brother, Jesus Christ; never mind that Ian and Mandy were the same fucking age. She had a great time showing Mickey the pills, like Ian hadn’t shown them to him first, and she made a big deal of yanking the baggie out of her bra, where she had stashed them for some fucking reason. Did this whole thing, all casual-like, where she threw out that Ian had agreed to buy her food some time, and then waited carefully for Mickey’s reaction; and assured him, after studying his face, that Ian was _probably gay, honestly, Mick_ because he hadn’t looked at her tits even once, which at least made the bra thing make more sense.

His sister was fucking nosy. Not even the end of all normalcy in their lives could change that.

Anyway, he was thinking about Gallagher a lot lately.

Mickey had the windows pushed open, and the air that poured in was damp and dark. He had never cared about shit like that before—how the fucking air was or whatever—but now those rectangles of nighttime and drizzling rain were precious. They filled up some of the empty space around him.

The thing about the house was that there was not a whole fucking lot in it. Before everything went down, they had already been planning to move: his dad had managed to get in with some big time dealers, and out with some South Siders who were less than impressed with his lack of loyalty. Combined with the extra cash Mickey and Mandy were pulling in selling potions and spell bags—money that Terry instantly laid claim to, despite the fact that he was deeply distrustful of magic and claimed to want no part of what his two youngest children were doing—they could afford to leave. The house wasn’t in Terry’s name, anyway; technically they were renting from their uncle. So they all packed their shit, and a bunch of cousins came in to haul out the TV and the couch and the guns, and they were on their way.

Mickey’s shit was the last to be moved. He hadn’t been around much those last few days, for whatever reason, and hadn’t really pulled his weight with the rest of the moving, so his family had left the boxes in his room mostly untouched. There was some other shit left in the house, too, the couch, stuff in cabinet corners or food that nobody wanted to move. Tampons. Cans of tomato soup. Mickey’s hunting knife.

Now, Mickey assumed that he had been last by design. The soup felt like a last minute decision to give Mickey a chance to survive; the knife felt like a choice for him not to.

At some point, his dad had made the decision to lock him up in the house and leave him to die slow.

The question was why. And Mickey—well. He kind of had an answer. It was one of those memories that started to twist around in his gut when he got too close to it, but he remembered a little.

He remembered his dad. He remembered something going very wrong, and the feeling of seeing something he shouldn’t have, and he remembered his entire body freezing up with the sick thought _ifuckedupifuckedupifuckedup_. He remembered a tall woman, a witch in a way that Mickey would never be, even though he was the most juiced up magician in the neighborhood. He remembered her sharp features and her accent, and the way her eyes kept darting over his shoulder as she spoke.

Mandy had told him, later, that he had let slip some of Terry’s business around the wrong people, that it was looking like Terry was going to get locked up for real because of Mickey’s big fucking mouth, that when Terry managed to wriggle out of it he had Mickey shut up before he could do any more damage.

Mickey didn’t know if that was true or not. What he did know was that Terry Milkovich was good at spreading rumors, and that he had a tendency to bully the truth until it bent to suit his needs.

In the end, Mickey guessed it didn’t really matter. He wasn’t dead. He hadn’t given up. The walls of Terry’s old room now featured a mural of slashed graffiti reading _GUESS WHAT DAD I’M FUCKING GAY._ And there was a kid named Ian Gallagher who had come to him for answers, and he finally thought he had some.

What Mickey did was he lit his fire, and he sat in his kitchen, and he thought about the color _red_. He thought about being young, younger than he had been in any other moment of his life, the kind of young that saw eyes on him on a fucking ball field, and made the decision to do something outlandish before he bailed. He thought about the sun settling on the back of his neck like a hand. He thought about meeting Ian’s eyes through the window.

He closed his eyes, and he thought, and he breathed a light, steady stream of _Ian_ across the fire. He asked, _is Ian cursed?_ and the fire dipped low. He asked, _is the magic coming from outside Ian’s house?_ and the fire dipped low. He asked, _is the magic coming from Ian?_ and the fire forked above the edge of the soup pot to breathe back into Mickey’s face.

Ian didn’t have any insight when Mickey broke the news, and maybe he hadn’t done it in the best way, but it wasn’t like Mickey was the gentlest person on Earth, so whatever. Ian’s eyes had gotten big, though, dark in his pale face, and a little punch of air had come from his mouth. So Mickey had told him that he would keep thinking about it, keep looking. What else was he supposed to do? It wasn’t about money anymore, maybe never had been. Mickey couldn’t give less of a shit if Mandy sold Gallagher’s pills, as long as the guy kept coming around.

So he pushed the windows up, up, watched them drive little ledges of greasy dust up the tracks, and took his knife to a bare patch of wall. On the wall, he made a list:

_snow_

_pool_

_rats_

_ian_

_the house is listening._

The thought he had, at the end of the list, was that Lip Gallagher had been fucking around with memory magic. If Ian had gotten caught up in it somehow, then maybe—but no; still, it wasn’t quite right.

Like a harsh underline to his unfinished thought, the storm outside broke open with an enormous _crack._ Awave of thunder followed it like an avalanche. The rain did not come in through the windows, because of course it didn’t, but it was raining, dense and hard. A second, even louder _crack_ ,louder than a firework, louder than a gunshot in the alley behind their house, splintered into the night. It was lightning, for a second time, bright and harsh like a black and white photo. Mickey watched it come down, close, way too close. It was a bony finger of electricity stabbing its sharp fingernail into the city at random. Into some poor sucker’s house, no doubt.

There was yelling, distant and dull, and more thunder. Mickey turned away from the window. It was a good night to be inside.

It felt like he was waiting for something.

He didn’t have long to wait.

Minutes later, like a third lightning strike, someone was hammering on the front door.

“Ian—” Drina began, but Mickey was already there, ripping the door open, letting it slam a dent into the wall behind it, like he cared—

And Ian, breathless and panting and soaked and scared, fucking scared, said, “Mickey, _help_ _me_ , I fucked up and I don’t know _how—_ ”

—And Mickey, breathless in a different way, said, “Ian, you just knocked on my door.”

Ian stopped, midsentence, chest heaving. He had obviously sprinted to get there, fastest fucking kid on the field. “What?” he choked, finally, and then, “Mickey, my house is on fire, the lightning, and I don’t know how I did it—”

Mickey’s throat was suddenly dry. Ian swam before him like a mirage, like a memory he was getting too close to. “Put your hand through the door,” he said hoarsely.

For a second, Mickey thought he wasn’t going to do it. But then Ian raised his hand, and put it up in the doorway. He paused, waiting for the buzzing, invisible wall that was certainly in place to keep him out and Mickey in; and then he kept going, until his hand and his wrist and his forearm were inside the house.

“Holy shit,” Mickey croaked.

“My house is _on fire_ ,” Ian replied.

“Right,” Mickey was shivering, like he had been the one dashing through the rain. “Fuck. Okay. What did you do, uh. Before?”

“ _Nothing,_ ” Ian insisted. His hand was still hovering like a weird ghost, an inch from the front of Mickey’s filthy tank top. “We were just in our room talking, and Carl said the lightning would hit us, and I said, don’t joke about that, because with our luck it will. And then it _did._ And _fuck_ I just left Fiona there to deal with it, I have no idea how to fix this, Mickey, she’s gonna kill me—”

Mickey plucked Ian’s hand from the air like it was a blessed sword he was pulling from a lake. It was damp and clammy, solid, sharp at the knuckles, a holy weapon. He could feel Ian’s heartbeat in his palm. “Gallagher,” Mickey said, and he wanted to put Ian’s hand against his mouth, he wanted, he wanted, “I want you to say, ‘My house is not on fire.’ And I want you to _mean_ it. Magic is just intent. That’s all it is.”

Ian studied him, just for a second, just for long enough to know he didn’t need to. His fingers twitched once beneath Mickey’s. He breathed a deep, faltering breath, squared his shoulders, and said, “My house is not on fire.”

“Good.” It was hard to tell which one of them was shaking more; but that was a nonsensical thought, because it was both of them. They were the same thing. Mickey was touching Ian, what the fuck. “Call your sister.” Mickey let go of Ian’s hand. “And come in, while you’re at it.”

Ian came inside. He called his sister.

Their house was not on fire.

It was ridiculous. It made no sense. Mickey opened his mouth to speak, and found himself laughing, instead, loud and hysterical.

Ian frowned, and the house was full of him, he was every lamp and painting and living being that was missing from the place. His eyes skimmed over the couch, the lone item in the room. “You have, like, no furniture,” he said, and of course, out of everything, that’s what he would focus on.

“I have a mattress in my room. I could show you, if you want,” Mickey said, like he was _flirting,_ with his thumb jerked over his shoulder and his eyebrows jacked up into points and a big, stupid grin on his face. Jesus, he didn’t know his face could smile like that, he was an idiot. But Ian was laughing, too, now, so maybe it was okay.

“I like the décor,” Ian teased, finally, after he was all laughed out. “ _Cocksucker_. Very classy. The ‘s’ is especially nice.”

“Right? That’s what I keep saying. So, okay, Gallagher—” Mickey slid to the floor, because he was done standing, just completely over it, “how the _fuck_ are you in my house right now?”

Ian slid down beside him. “I don’t know. I guess I never tried to come in before. I never touched the door or windows or anything, I just—this time, I didn’t think about it. Maybe I could always come in. Why did un-burning my house work?”

Why did it work? It was hard to know, because Mickey was thinking about Ian, about what he could do with Ian so close. What could he do? He could touch his hair, his face, grab his hands again, hook their legs together. Pass a cigarette back and forth. God, maybe Ian had some smokes. “I don’t know. I mean, I do, kind of. You told me that you’d said the pool was falling apart and it did, that lightning would strike your house before it happened. Figured it was worth a shot to have you just…say something that wasn’t shitty, you know? Hey—you didn’t ever just _say_ you could come in here, right?”

“No. I don’t think I ever talked about this place to anyone but your sister. But…I did say we should have a snow day,” Ian said, slowly. The pink of his mouth had crept past its edges, blurred into his skin. It made him look younger, somehow. “And I said—Debbie heard a weird sound, and I told her it was rats, that the only thing in the house Frank had never tried to sell were the rats in the walls.” He groaned. “Fuck. I don’t understand why this is happening.”

Mickey shrugged. His eyes kept drifting back to a watch-shaped line of skin on Ian’s left wrist where there weren’t any freckles. “Your brother was messing around with memory magic, right? Maybe shit went weird and you accidentally got looped in, or something.”

“No.” Ian was shaking his head. His hair was starting to curl as it dried. “I never got near what Lip and Vee were doing. And, anyway, the pills do the opposite. When the side effects hit…” Ian trailed off.

Something like fear slipped its cold way down Mickey’s back, through his stomach. “The reverse of what you say starts to happen,” Mickey finished. “It’s some kind of math bullshit, right? The pills fill in gaps that wouldn’t have been filled otherwise, so they start emptying shit to make up for it.”

Suddenly, desperately, Ian was up on his knees, tensed like he was expecting something to hit him. “I have gaps. I have to, I have to be missing things, because I can’t _remember_ you. I would have known you, I knew it, I _know it_.” He was whispering, all of his words a frantic hiss. “It’s a memory thing, still, right? Just, something taken away instead of added.” His hands were on Mickey’s shoulders. “Mickey, how can I remember you?”

“The counter to a memory spell is an opposing memory spell,” Mickey said, automatically, recited from whatever library book he had learned it from in the first place. “I can’t remember shit, Ian, I can’t remember a single fucking thing, it’s like someone took a blender to the inside of my head.” He shifted to his knees, too. The light was on in the kitchen, Mandy had actually paid the power that month, and the dim yellow of the fixture made Ian glow on one side. “I’m not cursed either, what if—Jesus Christ, what if I just can’t fucking remember how to _get out_?” He brought his hands to Ian’s hips, pushed at his pockets, and God, what a thing that was. “Do you have any of the pills, Ian, do you have—?”

“No,” Ian said, and Mickey’s heart stopped, for one second, two, three, and then, “Wait, yes,” and Ian was leaning forward and digging in his back pocket, taking his wallet out, digging again. “I was supposed to meet with Mandy today, she wanted french fries or something, but then she cancelled, I left them in my pocket,” and he emerged with a Ziploc bag containing ten tiny, lavender pills.

“Take one,” Mickey ordered, and Ian did.

At first, nothing seemed to happen. Ian’s breath shuddered in and out like moths, and his eyes were fixed in his lap where he had fumbled out the pills, and he did not change at all. But then his breath sucked in once, and came back out even and deep, and when he looked up at Mickey his pupils were tunnels. “Mickey,” he said soft, so soft; and then he took another pill, and another, and then he shook out four more into his palm.

When Ian brought his hand up to Mickey’s mouth, all Mickey could think for a brief, wild moment was that Ian was going to kiss him. But he didn’t. Instead, he pushed the pills against Mickey’s mouth until Mickey tongued them off his palm and swallowed them.

After that, Ian did kiss him. It was warm pressure, an anchor; was this his first kiss? he couldn’t remember. It was a small thing, the biggest conceivable thing—and then the world shattered.

*

They shouldn’t have been fucking in the living room. But Ian wanted to, and for once, Mickey didn’t argue. There wasn’t much left in the house, anyway: just the couch, the shit in Mickey’s room, the random debris of moving that inevitably collected in the corners. _When else will we get the chance, Mick?_ Ian had asked, low and convincing. _It’ll be like a goodbye to this house. Like the opposite of a christening._

 _Everything about us is the opposite of a christening,_ Mickey had replied, but he’d grinned, dragged out the beads and the lube and spread himself over the back of the couch.

Nobody else was supposed to be home. Mickey was meant to be finishing up and meeting them at the new place; everyone else was already over unpacking, but Mickey got stuck with the dregs because he hadn’t been around to help move any of the other furniture. He’d been at Gallagher’s place most of that time, but whatever. Not like that was anyone’s business.

It was fair, though, that he should move the couch and his bed and his boxes, the two fucking pans and the box of cereal that were left, whatever else. He had told his dad that he would get a buddy to help. Kev had let Ian borrow the truck. They would have gotten around to hefting the couch out of the house and into the truck bed, eventually.

Except Terry forgot something. And he came back.

 

By the time the witch was called, there was a lot of blood. She was lovely, and Russian, and terrifying, and Ian was imagining all of the ways she might kill them. It was inevitable. To die by her hand would be better than by Terry’s, at least.

She did not kill them.

Ian was aware of her, how she stood just inside with the door open behind her, washed out by the pale light, making the room look even emptier than it was. She was talking, rapid, tripping speech, looking at Terry with disdain, like he was an inconvenience and not a mountain. She was saying, _What do you mean, I can’t say in Russian_ and _You want too many things for a man with too little money._

Ian was thinking about Mickey.

In the end, Terry didn’t really know what he wanted. Or, he did—he wanted her to make his kid not a faggot; she couldn’t do that. He wanted her to blast that little ginger fucker to space; she couldn’t do that. He wanted her to keep them apart, and make sure that Mickey wasn’t his fucking problem anymore in the process.

She could do that.

Terry threw one of Ian’s shoes at Ian’s head, and screamed at him to get the fuck out of his house, so Ian did. Out the front door, limping, bleeding into his eye and his mouth. Tripping on the front step as he looked back to see just how dead Mickey’s eyes were. Outside, down the stairs, ten down to the yard. Beyond the gate was freedom, surprising and sickening as it was.

Ian went out the gate. And then he looped around the back of the house, and climbed back in through the window in Mickey’s room, still cracked from earlier, when they had overheated from shifting shit around and opened it in hopes of letting in some air.

He didn’t really know what he planned to do, just that he couldn’t leave Mickey in there by himself. He would do something, if he had to. It wasn’t hard to go down the hall: he had plenty of experience sneaking in and out of this room. Quick steps on the sides of his feet, over the floor’s creaky places, past Mandy’s bedroom door, which was thrown open to reveal purple painted walls and nothing.

In the living room, Terry’s back was to Ian. Mickey was still on the couch—still, on the couch. Fuck. Mickey had gotten worse from Terry than Ian had. Who knew what had happened in the few minutes he had been gone.

Terry was saying, “So no one can get in, like, what, a goddamn home security system?”

“That is what I say,” the witch snapped. “No one comes in but people in house when I do spell. No one comes out.”

“And no one will know anything about it?”

“That is what I say,” she said, again.

Ian pressed himself against the wall of the hallway, in one of the many shadows that had always populated the house, and waited for an excuse. He thought about how he might get past the witch; he thought about how he might kill Mickey’s father. He took stock of the room, and found little to work with, just the couch, the discarded tank top that had started the morning on Mickey’s torso, an open box of miscellaneous junk that they had filled earlier in the day. He didn’t think they had thrown anything useful in there: Ian could see the top of a loosely rolled poster, the handle of a rusty skillet. Maybe if he was quick, he could use that to brain Terry, and then heft Mickey off the couch and take off out the door. If it came to that, he thought he could do it.

Ian watched Mickey watch the witch. She was removing baggies of dirt and dried plants from her knockoff designer bag, plastic containers of sharp, charred animal teeth and glistening stones and something that looked like chunky dishwater. Ian didn’t know what any of it meant, but Mickey must have, because as she laid out her components, Mickey made a pained, humorless sound that might have passed for a laugh in some other situation.

She dumped it all out and made a pile on the floor. And then she added something else, and Mickey said, “Wait,” and she added something else, and Mickey said, “Wait, what the _fuck_ ,” and tried to struggle to his feet. But she was already ordering Terry out of the house in a rolling, no-nonsense staccato, and Terry, who understood nothing about magic and was certainly scared shitless underneath his bullish anger, hurled himself out the door as if it were his decision to do so.

She scraped her mess into two piles, but seemed dissatisfied, and cast her eyes around the room until they lit on the box. And as she moved to it, Ian remembered the one thing in the box that might have been of some use to him, right as she grasped its handle.

It was a hunting knife, hefty and sharp, with a wicked looking gut hook curving from the back of the blade. Mickey had received it from some cousin or other as a birthday gift that year, and it had sat unused under a pile of dirty clothes for the better part of three months. It had gone into the box that morning, with the skillet and one of Iggy’s endless posters featuring half naked girls or cars or some combination of the two.

The witch held it, and then she looked up, and she saw Ian.

What happened next happened quickly. Ian threw himself into the room, heart pounding into his throat because he didn’t give a shit if Terry was still on the porch and he didn’t give a shit about witches, he gave a shit about that knife going anywhere near Mickey.

The witch, for the second time, did not kill either of them. What she did was laugh, and say, “This serves him right for being cheap asshole,” and jam her unnecessarily high heel into the center of the first pile she had made. When she stepped back, a bloom of flame rose where her heel had been. The smoke it gave off was thick, chalky, and close to Ian. It seemed to fill the room and Ian’s lungs in an instant.

“Well, fuck,” Mickey coughed. It was getting hard to see him, but it was hard to know whether that was due to the smoke, or the sudden sensation that Ian’s mind was several inches removed from his body.

“You,” the witch said, facing Mickey, “you are smarter than your father, yes?”

“I sure fucking hope so,” Mickey answered. Ian could see that Mickey’s feet were flat on the floor. This was because he himself was doubled over.

“Good. Tell me, then: how do you unlock a door?”

Mickey coughed again. “With a key?”

“Good,” she said. “Try not to forget that part.” She raised the knife, then, a silver glitter in a sea of swirling grey, and stabbed it through the center of her second pile, deep into the floor. A tall shower of sparks rose from the pile, and pierced through the fog in tiny pinpricks of neon orange and red.

Ian watched the sparks drift, bright like fireworks, like stars. In watching them, he did not notice as bits of himself drifted away in a similar fashion. Seconds or minutes later, when the woman in the room commanded, “Time to go, Orange Boy,” he followed her without thought or complaint. His next immediate memory was falling face forward into his bed, shoulders warm with afternoon light, and waking up in the morning with an uneasy feeling he couldn’t place.

*

Mickey remembered ten am, hot the way only the hottest days of Chicago summer got. The Gallagher AC was on the fritz yet again, so Ian was taking the younger kids to the pool. Mickey, with nothing better to do than trail Gallagher like a puppy, with nothing he wanted to do more, came along. Liam was too young to care who took him where, and Carl had seen Mickey in and out of his, Ian, and Lip’s bedroom enough times to be unalarmed by Mickey’s presence, but Debbie, with her wary eyes and tight, frizzy braid and pink swimsuit, kept throwing startled glances back at Mickey. She had tried to be subtle, but Mickey had heard when she slunk up to Ian, stuck close to his side, and whispered, “Why is Mickey Milkovich following us?”

“He's not following us. I invited him,” Ian had answered, easy and unconcerned. Even from the back of the caravan, Mickey could feel Ian’s smile like a sunburst in his throat. “Mickey’s cool.”

“So you guys are, like, friends?” Debbie seemed suspicious, but not nearly as much as she should have been.

“Something like that,” Ian agreed. The sidewalk was scorching, even through Mickey’s shoes, and he could already feel sweat prickling along his hairline. The hot smell of melting tar stung through the air in waves. The triangle of t-shirt hanging loose between Ian’s shoulder blades was a bullseye made for Mickey’s eyes to hit.

This memory came after the memory of the dugouts, the tang of rust and the sweaty bite of chain link between his fingers. It came after target practice in the old buildings up the street, and fucking in the freezers at the Kash-n-Grab, and trying to coax magic from Ian’s fingers as an excuse to hold his hands, and their first real kiss, Mickey’s first real kiss. It came after the first time they fell asleep in the same bed, Ian’s bed that was too small for him alone, much less him and Mickey both. But Ian had tricked him onto the bed and then slid in beside him like a cage, or a blanket, or an ice pack on a bruised limb. He had ended up with his nose under Ian’s jaw, his mouth tucked against this crease in Ian’s neck that he had never even noticed before, and Ian had jammed his thumb in between two of Mickey’s ribs, and they had laughed themselves into a senseless pile of limbs.

This memory came before the one where they accidentally started a fire in the vacant lot behind the bowling alley, or the one where they got high as fuck in Mickey’s room and Mickey tried to figure out how to make ink that would make tattoos move under the skin, or the one where Mickey lived at the Gallaghers’ house for two weeks, or the one where they fucked in the near-empty living room of the Milkovich house.

It came before the one where a witch, one with incredible power and a deep desire to fuck over Terry Milkovich, sunk a knife into a bastardized combination of an inch-thick, 1300 square foot shield spell and the idea of an electric fence. It came before the one where she pulled the knife out of the floor before leaving, and handed it to Mickey.

It came much before the one where Mickey realized she had not handed him a knife, but a key.

 

The world, when Mickey opened his eyes, was teetering on the edge of morning. Each scored line in the floor, each hacked hole and letter in the walls, was caught with a faint pink light.

Some part of Ian was under Mickey’s head—his stomach, maybe, or his thigh. Mickey couldn’t remember ever feeling this kind of calm, this brand of fearless clarity. His head, for the first time in years, was in order. He wasn’t missing any pieces of himself.

He knew how to get out.

He sat up, swiped at his face, rubbed his eyes. He found that he had been sleeping on Ian’s stomach: the shirt there was wrinkled, drawn up from Ian's hips. It had been more than two years since he had last touched Ian there.

He replaced his head with his hand, fanned it out and pressed it against Ian’s stomach. Rubbed it up and under his shirt, comforting and aimless. “Ian,” he said, soft, and then, “Gallagher,” a little louder. “Time to wake up.”

Ian’s eyebrows pinched in and made a little line, the way they did every time Mickey woke him up, Mickey remembered. When his eyes blinked open, they were wet. “Mickey,” he said, voice creaky, and then they were clutching each other.

In the end, Ian had gotten more of the memory spell than Mickey had, so he had been wiped clean where Mickey had been blurred and scrambled. He had manifested symptoms first because more had been taken from him, big results for big memories. It was hard, even for Mickey, to imagine a memory spell good enough to do what this one had; then again, he had no idea what a lifetime of training could do for a person, as he had never been allowed the opportunity.

In the end, Mickey had stabbed every fucking place in that house except for the right one. Why would he stick his knife somewhere that had already been marked up? As an artist, a used canvas did him no good. As someone in search of escape, a damaged surface showed that he had already been there, and failed. He had been getting close to it, though, finally thinking in the right way, finally thinking past the rumors and assumptions and mass memory blanks that his dad had orchestrated. But in the end, his dad knew fuck-all about magic: if he had known anything, anything at all, he would have known that locks, by nature, require keys, and he would have demanded to own the one that matched his son’s prison.

So when Mickey and Ian were no longer shaking, when they were standing and moving and clear-eyed, Mickey retrieved the knife from beneath one of the open windows, where he had dropped it the night before when Ian had hammered down his door. He held the knife, and he let his hands go numb and buzzing, and he thought about leaving. He filled his body with the idea, and held it in and in and in, because magic was just intent, that’s all; and then he found the blade-sized pock mark in a patch of lightly scorched floor that he had never paid much attention to, and drove the knife into it.

The air crackled audibly, like a campfire or a breaking bone. Mickey waited, and felt it and _felt_ t, and then said, “Oh, right,” and turned the knife in the slot until the blade snapped.

There was a sound like rushing water. Like the air being cleaned.

In the end, they opened the front door, and stepped through it, onto the porch.

It was like this: humidity still hanging from the previous night’s rain, early sun streaming into every exposed pore on Mickey’s skin, the peeling paint and the splinters under their feet, ten concrete steps down to real dirt. They flew down each one, until they reached the browning patch of weeds and tall, tangled greenery that was the yard.

Mickey threw himself down, skin to ground, and sprawled out like a sunbather or a snow angel. “Let’s burn it down,” he said, to Ian, who was crouching beside him, because of course he was. “The whole house, Gallagher, let’s fucking torch it.”

“Maybe,” Ian said, “if you want to,” and “Jesus, that fucking sucked,” and “I guess we kinda owe Lip, huh, he’s never gonna let you hear the end of it,” and “If your dad saw us right now, he would kill us.”

“At least I’ll die in the fucking grass,” Mickey answered.

There was something real and living everywhere Mickey looked. Trees, and houses. The L tracks. A thousand places he and Ian had met up and fucked up and fucked and walked in the same direction, always on the same ill-advised path the other wanted to take.

“Let’s call Mandy tonight.” Ian pushed his right hand into an anemic patch of clover, his left into the long hair on top of Mickey’s head. “My family, Kev and Vee. The neighborhood is always up for a bonfire.”

“I could burn it from here.” Mickey sat up. “Blameless fucking accident, no accelerant, plenty of faulty wires in there. Nobody wants to think magic, so they won’t.”

They grinned at each other, two mirrors turned in to face one another and reflect teeth and laugh lines and bright eyes back and forth and forth and forth. They were laughing as Ian pulled Mickey to his feet. Mickey was covered in mud all down his back, so Ian kicked some up onto his front, too, and then he pulled their gritty mouths together until the mud and the house and everything else disappeared.

“Yeah,” Mickey said, finally, when they had separated—as separate as Mickey ever planned for them to be, ever again, if he was honest. “Fuck this place.”

When they left, they left the gate swinging wide open. Their damp, departing footprints left crisscrossing tracks on the sidewalk, but before long, the sun burned those away, too.

**Author's Note:**

> _Since I was old enough to speak I've said it with alarm_   
>  _Some part of me was lost in your sleeve_   
>  _Where you hid your cigarettes_   
>  _No I'll never forget_   
>  _I just want to be near you_
> 
> *
> 
> Hi! Thanks for reading! First things first: this story is part of round 7 of the Shameless Big Bang, and [adumbtree](https://adumbtree-draws.tumblr.com/) made a badass, excellent, VERY GOOD piece of art for this story that you should all view immediately by clicking [here.](https://adumbtree-draws.tumblr.com/post/182903903482/my-big-bang-piece-for-hysterical-light-by) Please go talk about how good it is, loudly.
> 
> Second things second: the title of this story comes from the song _Eugene_ by Sufjan Stevens.
> 
> Third things third: I love Mickey and Ian. I've never done anything like this before, but I had to for them.
> 
> Feel free to yell at me in the comments, or on tumblr: I am [sentimentalspiders](https://sentimentalspiders.tumblr.com/) over there, and it's certain that I already love you.


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